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Student activists from all over the United States are heading to the University of California Los Angeles this week for the United States Student Association’s annual National Student Congress.

The Congress is where USSA, the country’s oldest and largest national student association, elects its leaders and sets its agenda for the coming year, but it’s also a lot more than that. Since 1947, the Congress has been a place where student government leaders and other student activists have come together to share ideas, plot strategy, and learn new tactics. The Congress, like USSA itself, is a crucial part of the infrastructure of the American student movement.

The Congress itself doesn’t formally get underway until Thursday, but pre-meeting events will be going on all week, and as the #NSC10 Twitter feed shows, USSA’s activists are already beginning to make their way to Los Angeles. I’ll be flying out to LA myself on Friday morning, and staying through the end of Congress next Tuesday.

As readers of this blog well know, California has produced an incredible amount of campus organizing this past year. Over the next eight days, UCLA will host an extraordinary gathering of activists from across the state and nation. It’s going to be a big deal.

Expect lots of news and previews starting today, and extensive on-the-scene coverage while I’m out there.

A University of Washington police officer secretly attended — and participated in — two organizing meetings of a campus activist group this spring.

Officer Tanesha van Leuven sat in on two meetings where students planned a rally against budget cuts and support for campus custodial workers, calling herself “Tani,” a recent graduate who supported the cause. Her cover was blown weeks later when students who had attended one of the meetings saw her in uniform, getting into a patrol car on campus.

Her infiltration of the second meeting, however, did not become known until the American Civil Liberties Union uncovered it through a public records request.

A university spokesperson said this week that Officer van Leuven’s spying and deception “was not consistent with university policy, and the way we do policing work and it’s certainly not the way we relate to our students.” But activists and civil libertarians are pushing for a state law barring such infiltration in the future.

Maxwell Love has an interesting post up over at The SGA Blog on student power and the role of national student organizations. It’s an intro post, a starting point for a longer discussion, and I’m eager to see where he goes with it.

Love gives my dissertation a welcome shout-out, in the context of discussing the concessions campus administrators made to student activists in the late sixties and the seventies. But there’s a chunk of his argument that I’d disagree with, or at least complicate.

He writes that when administrators “made concessions to allow students some ‘power’ to assume governing roles in their institutions, a step backward in the formulation of real student power was made,” because

Administrations realized that if they gave the majority of students some right in determining appropriate college conduct, and encouraged them to think they did have real power, they could easily squash any dissent or disorderly students quicker than with ironclad rules. But please my peers; let’s not buy these bribes and illusions of power.

It’s true that campus administrators did — and do — seek to co-opt  student movements for the transformation of higher ed by granting concessions that don’t alter the fundamental relations of power in the institutions. But that doesn’t mean that a student judiciary can’t be a useful check on administration overreach, that a student seat on a faculty senate is worthless, or that there’s no benefit to a student government in moving from being slightly less to slightly more autonomous.

Incremental change may be significant change, and it may lay the groundwork for additional change in the future. It may also, of course, be meaningless “reform” that has the effect of deflating student protest. Figuring out which is which — and then communicating that distinction effectively to the campus — is a huge and crucial challenge for any student activist campaign.